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was dominant, Yamashita's professional career suffered in spite of his
being a brilliant commander, as his capture of Singapore demonstrated.
Neither his complete innocence of what he was tried for, nor his history
of opposition to Tojo's war plans saved Yamashita. A scapegoat was
needed.
Mr. Reel's book tells the story of the Yamashita trial and of the
vain appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It
is a model of good journalism
(though the author is not a writer but a trade-union lawyer): lucid, .
factual, written with both feeling and restraint, reading as absorbingly
as a good detective story and presenting an overpowering accumulation
of evidence that Yamashita was the victim of a judicial lynching. The
author was one of six American officers who were assigned, for the
most part against their will, to defend Yamashita. Once these six
officers-three colonels, a major, and two captains-had looked into
the facts, they all became convinced of Yamashita's innocence and
they all conducted his defense with a vigor and tenacity most displeasing
to their superiors. The moral courage shown by these officers is one
of the two encouraging aspects of the affair-the other being the
magnificent dissenting opinions of the late Justices Murphy and Rut–
ledge. Our society still seems to produce, at high levels, men with a
passion for justice; this is something, even if they are often on the
losing side.
The trial before the military commission sitting in Manila lasted
five weeks-October 29 to December 7, 1945. It was not a fair trial, as
the term is understood in this country, for three reasons: (1) the defense
was not given reasonable time for preparation: two days before the
trial opened, the defense was notified that the bill-of-particulars against
their client had been increased from 64 items to 123; the commission
refused them any extra time to prepare to meet these 59 last-minute ad–
ditional charges; (2) the prosecution was allowed to introduce evidence
no American court would permit: hearsay evidence, affidavits presented
without any chance to cross-examine the deponents; (3) the attitude
of the generals on the commission-all of them, interestingly enough,
"desk-chair" generals without combat experience in the war, as against
the defense officers, who had aU seen fighting in the Pacific-was
openly hostile to the defense, going so far as to cut short awkward
cross-examinations, to change their rulings on orders from MacArthur,
etc. It is a shabby, and rather terrifying, record, as given in detail by
Mr. Reel.
The same adjectives apply to the majorIty decision of our own
Supreme Court in the case. After the commission had convicted
